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Remembering the cost of freedom

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
05/25/2013 09:53:00 AM EDT

This is a sad a day.

It is a moment when we put aside our customary ways, the hurried activities in the pressing tempo of our lives, and give sober contemplation to those young men and women who through all of our history have known the unspeakable horrors of war and died so that we may live in freedom.

We do what we can to honor and remember those gallant young people who, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it, "...gave the last full measure of devotion" as they died in battle to protect our union and all the liberties it provides for us.

There is little we can do. They are gone from us. They sleep in graves across our country and in distant lands, and live now only in the minds of those who knew and loved them or in a picture hanging on a wall or in an oft-spoken name. We cannot grip their hands and return their smiles or hold them in a tight embrace, tears of joy streaming from our eyes, as thousands of grieving mothers would give their own lives to do.

We only have our memories. We can only perform the rituals and hold the exercises that give some small substance to the grief and loss we feel as we look back to the wars we have fought and indeed still fight. We do that on Memorial Day.

This day of memory began after the Civil War, in which more than 600,000 young men died in a nation of 75 million. This was equal, the statisticians tell us, to deaths of 5 million in today's nation of more than 310 million. So vast was the sacrifice our forebears.

From that distant day came the formal observances of memory.

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Now we have parades, in which our flag flutters before us, hands over our hearts in salute, as the marching column passes, speeches on village greens and in cities, the playing of "Departed Days" by a military band, and the rifle salutes and the strewing of flowers by girls in white dresses. We try to tell those gone from us that we remember them.

The strewing of flowers, at places honoring our dead, began in the South after the Civil War. It was so strong in its emotional power that it spread throughout the land and became a key part of observances in many places. The marching columns pass by spectators lining the parade routes, all eager to be part of the memorial. Sober audiences listen to addresses by public officials, all speaking of the loss of our soldiers and the freedoms they protected for us.

We strive to express the honor we hold for those who died for us and the sorrow we feel that they were taken from us in the full bloom of their youth. We yearn to speak to them and laugh with them and listen to their stories and let them how much we miss them. Yet there is no way we can do those things; they are gone, and we can only express our grief to one another.

And we can show our sympathy, too, for the mothers and fathers who still live with the shock and sudden burst of grief they felt when they were informed that their sons -- and their daughters in our recent and current wars -- had been killed in the crushing cruelty of the battle front. And we can give thought to the unrelenting sadness carried through their lives by the mothers and fathers of those who died in early wars.

It is easy in this time of luxury and instant gratification, and the ease electronic wonders have brought us to forget how much we as a nation have suffered to retain the freedoms our soldiers have died for. It is easy to sit unmoved as televsion brings us pictures of our soldiers at their battle positions and the flag-draped caskets bearing the bodies of our servicemen and women, as they are carried from airplanes from the fighting front for burial here. It all seems so far away. It is all happening to someone else. The sorrow and loss are being suffered by others.

But they are suffered by all of us. The grief and loss are ours, all of ours. We, as a nation, are crushed by the losses of our young warriors. We, as a nation, share the pain felt by those most directly involved in soldiers' deaths.

So we have set aside a day, a brief moment, to express our national sorrow with our exercises and rituals, reminders of the cost and the unassessable value of the liberties our sons and daughters have died to protect. We have planned exercises and activities to give substance to our grief.

Memorial Day is that day, when we pay honor to those who have died for us, as indeed we should do every day.

Today we bow our heads and think back.

Today we give thanks to the unnumbered thousands who have died to keep us free.

Today we remember.

Bob Reed, 92, is a former editorial writer for The Sun and a veteran of World War II. Send comments to: bgreedy1@aol.com.

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